Cataloging from the Kitchen: The Luminous World of Arun Ghosh
Sarmistha Dutta Gupta _____________________ Arun Ghosh (1933-2015), phenomenal librarian and archivist who guided many humanities and social science researchers of Kolkata for over four decades, passed away last February unsung in death as in life. Arun-babu, as he was widely known, was the founder librarian of Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata). Late in life he also built from scratch the Bhabani Sen Library of rare communist periodicals and books in Bhupesh Bhavan, the headquarters of the CPI in the city. The Moments of Bengal Partition : Selections from the Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1947 – 48 is the outcome of Arun-babu’s meticulous research and offers a selection of news and editorial articles from the Amrita Bazar Patrika, the leading ‘nationalist’ daily of the time, in the months immediately before the Partition and after. Towards the end of his life, Arun-babu was engaged in another significant compilation as he was editing a dictionary of Bengali terms associated with books, reading and library usage. In remembering Arun Ghosh a year after his passing, I offer excerpts from a long interview with him that I did in 2012 for the golden jubilee archive of IIMC, Joka (reproduced with permission). Arun-babu had also served IIMC as a young librarian in its initial years. In the interview he came across as a great raconteur with an inexhaustible stock of anecdotes. These excerpts largely trace the extraordinary journey of a young man growing up in Calcutta in a refugee family in the late-40s and early 50s, who began as a worker at the Ichhapur Gun and Shell Factory, spent a few years working at the office of the Providend Fund Commissioner—spending much time browsing and reading on his own all this while—and finally chose to be a librarian for his love of books. On his childhood and growing up, Independence and Partition I was born on 24 July 1933 in a village in Barisal in East Bengal [now Bangladesh]. My father used to work in Kolkata, and we came away here. I distinctly remember that when I got admitted to school at the age of 5 or 6, my father had rented a house in Agarpara. This would be around 1939 or 1940. There was no school in Agarpara then. So I would have to commute by train daily to the nearest school. Now for a child of that age, commuting by train posed certain dangers. At this point my grandfather, who was a teacher in a school in Ulpur in Faridpur district of east Bengal, wrote to my father, saying, if you send the boy to me, he can stay here and study in my school. So at age 7 I was admitted to class III in that school. When I was in class IX my grandfather was taken seriously ill. My maternal uncles brought him to Calcutta and I accompanied them and began living with my grandfather in a rented house in Dakshineshwar. That was 1946. Partition came within a year. I was admitted to a school here in 1947 in class IX. On Independence Day I heard that one could travel free in buses coming to Kolkata, and that they would take you to Fort William. Along with a few of my classmates I came to Kolkata and took the tour. I remember it distinctly. But the euphoria vanished within a year. In 1948 when Gandhiji was assassinated, I was thinking a bit differently, perhaps I was getting to be politically aware. I remember, when the news came to Dakshineshwar I fasted the whole day. Maybe I had thought that bereavement could also be expressed through fasting. This reaction was very spontaneous. Another memory that haunts me to this day is the memory of refugees coming from East Pakistan in hordes, including several of my very close relations. They were gathering in the vicinity of our house, and looking for places for shelter. I was seeing all this. And then gradually I lost the feeling of joy that I had about Independence just a year ago. I was seeing my own close relations suffer. I was seeing refugee life in Sealdah station. It was terrible. I was reacting to all this happening around me and I could no longer concentrate on my studies. I somehow took my Matriculation in 1949, and just managed to scrape through. My younger brother and sisters were all in school. Some of my close relations from our native place were staying with us in that small one-roomed house, some were shacking up in the verandah, and some were putting up in accommodations in the locality. My father just had his small income to support all of them. I initially got admitted to a college for my Intermediate. It used be IA then. We had moved to Sodepur during this time. My father told me, ‘I won’t be able to afford your IA expenses. You’ll have to buy books, commute from Sodepur to the college. Since you are a Matriculate now, why don’t you look for a job? I’ll try to look around too.’ I was only 16 years old then. I had to quit college and look for a job. Highly qualified individuals from east Bengal were also looking for jobs, and they were taking up any job that came their way. They were even taking up jobs of labourers, or some small odd jobs in shops, or even working as domestic help in rich families, so that shelter and food would be provided for. Checking gun parts for a living and studying at night Anyway, I registered my name in the Barrackpore Employment Exchange. I was called for a job interview of a ‘Viewer’ at the Ichhapur Gun and Shell Factory. The job title was rather showy, but my job was to measure the separate components of the rifle to check whether they were of the correct size. So I was basically ‘viewing’ whether the shapes and sizes of the gun parts were okay or